The role of the architect has changed dramatically in the past few years and is headed for even more change as the landscape of possible technology options is only going to
increase. Faced with a list of options that is increasing almost daily across a highly
competitive landscape, many architectural decisions have become an exercise in avoiding error rather than exploring possibility.

Whilst an acceptance of failure is becoming the norm in smaller development faced activities, architects must make big decisions that can affect the entire operation of an organisation. This webinar explores some ideas for architectural best practice and mechanisms for reducing risk whilst empowering architects to unleash some of the exciting new options available to them.

Digital Transformation is an over-used phrase and one that is often used to describe what is
essentially business transformation that is underpinned by technology. Does this mean that
these transformations are deeply vertical and need deep industry experience to be
successful? In this webinar we examine how organisations can learn from other industry
sectors and also from breaking the standard rules within their own industry.
In this webinar, listeners will be able to learn:
- How do we look across industries and learn from success in others?
- How do we escape from the ‘me too’ transformational activity and break away from trying to keep up and get in front?

The majority of organisations today are running their IT estate across multiple platforms including private clouds, on-premise data centres, software as a service, and public clouds. Whilst this flexibility can drive significant business benefit, there are a number of key areas of operations and governance that require a different approach. Many organisations have suffered from cost management challenges despite the claims of many cloud providers that their platform will create savings and so we will examine options for effective cost management that actually work – and the pitfalls to avoid!

Cloud itself has a well-established security pedigree but managing security and risk across multiple clouds adds a layer of complexity that can lead to issues and so we will explore some of the key risks in such an environment and suggest how these can also be mitigated.

The cloud strategy of today's enterprise spans across multiple clouds and hundreds of applications. Point security solutions no longer work, so enterprises are turning toward a more orchestrated approach to achieving security and compliance in the cloud.

Join cloud and security leaders in an interactive discussion to learn about:
- Key security and compliance challenges associated with a multi-cloud strategy
- Recommendations for managing and automating security across multiple clouds and applications
- The future of cloud
- Improving enterprise security in an ever-changing threat landscape

Kubernetes (k8s) is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes promises simplified management of cloud workloads at scale, whether on-premises, hybrid, or in a public cloud infrastructure, allowing effortless movement of workloads from cloud to cloud. By some reckonings, it is being deployed at a rate several times faster than virtualization.

In this presentation, we’ll introduce Kubernetes and present use cases that make clear where and why you would want to use it in your IT environment. We’ll also focus on the enterprise requirements of orchestration and containerization, and specifically on the storage aspects and best practices.

•What is Kubernetes? Why would you want to use it?
•How does Kubernetes help in a multi-cloud/private cloud environment?
•How does Kubernetes orchestrate & manage storage? Can Kubernetes use Docker?
•How do we provide persistence and data protection?
•Example use cases

Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we’ve built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components.

We build effective systems in a cost-optimal way by using appropriate quantities of expensive and fast memory (DRAM for instance) to cache our cheaper and slower storage. But currently fast memory has no persistence at all; it’s only storage that provides the application the guarantee that storing, modifying or deleting data does exactly that.

Memory and storage differ in other ways. For example, we load from memory to registers on the CPU, perform operations there, and then store the results back to memory by using byte addresses. This load/store technology is different from storage, where we tend to move data back and fore between memory and storage in large blocks, by using an API (application programming interface).

New memory technologies are challenging these assumptions. They look like storage in that they’re persistent, if a lot faster than traditional disks or even Flash based SSDs, but we address them in bytes, as we do memory like DRAM, if more slowly. These PMs (persistent memories) lie between storage and memory in latency, bandwidth and cost, while providing memory semantics and storage persistence. In this webcast, SNIA experts will discuss:

•Traditional uses of storage and memory as a cache
•How can we build and use systems based on PM?
•What would a system with storage, persistent memory and DRAM look like?
•Do we need a new programming model to take advantage of PM?
•Interesting use cases for systems equipped with PM
•How we might take better advantage of this new technology

Has hybrid cloud reached a tipping point? According to research from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), IT organizations today are struggling to strike the right balance between public cloud and their on-premises infrastructure. In this SNIA webcast, ESG senior analyst, Scott Sinclair, will share research on current cloud trends, covering:

When it comes to continuous deployment on open source software, there are numerous benefits for application developers. Now that we're living in the era of multi-cloud and building apps that are cloud-native, it's more important than ever to have a multi-cloud platform CI/CD model.

Tune into this live panel discussion with experts in the field as they discuss:

- How to build CI/CD models for public, private and hybrid cloud
- The different benefits that Kubernetes provides for building infrastructure as code
- How service mesh and microservices fit into your CI/CD model
- How to get the most out of your cloud deployments

Kubernetes, microservices, AI and machine learning have forever changed the traditional enterprise tech stack. As DevOps practices become increasingly more adopted and widely used, automation is imperative for your tech teams and cloud infrastructure to remain scalable and turnkey. Join this live panel discussion with experts in the Cloud, IT Infrastructure and DevOps communities as they discuss these and other major trends, and what to look out for in the coming years.

Topics include:
- How to accelerate software delivery in the era of automation and composable infrastructure
- Infrastructure as code and changing organizational design
- How to properly set up your DevOps automation and see big cloud cost savings
- The future of DevOps in the cloud and real life use cases for applications and machine learning

Join SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Education Chair and leading analyst Tom Coughlin for a journey into the requirements and trends in worldwide data storage for entertainment content acquisition, editing, archiving, and digital preservation. This webcast will cover capacity and performance trends and media projections for direct attached storage, cloud, and near-line network storage. It will also include results from a long-running digital storage survey of media and entertainment professionals. Learn what is needed for digital cinema, broadcast, cable, and internet applications and more.

This webcast will present an overview of scale-out file system architectures. To meet the increasingly higher demand on both capacity and performance in large cluster computing environments, the storage subsystem has evolved toward a modular and scalable design. The scale-out file system is one implementation of the trend, in addition to scale-out object and block storage solutions. This presentation will provide an introduction to scale-out-file systems and cover:

You need to rethink your WAN to survive the next 5 years. We can help show you how.

Think about it: half of your IT services come from the cloud, from folks such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Office365, and Oracle Cloud. Mixing cloud and internal sources, you serve an increasingly scattered and mobile staff. IoT is turning the physical environment into both a provider and a consumer of IT services.

Is the WAN you built for Client/Server really going to serve?

No. IT needs to rethink its WAN and re-engineer the economics of wide-area networking.

Join Nemertes as we bring our WAN technology research study and freshly updated, one-of-a-kind cost and performance benchmarks to bear on the challenges of remaking your WAN to drive success in the cloud age. We'll discuss:
• SD-WAN and the real benefits it can deliver for performance and cost
• Other cloud-friendly network technologies such as direct-connect and WAN-Cloud Exchanges
• Up-to-date cost and provider performance data for MPLS and Internet services.

The SNIA Swordfish™ specification for the management of storage systems and data services is an extension of the DMTF Redfish® specification. Together, these specifications provide a unified approach for the management of servers and storage in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.

To help speed your Swordfish development efforts, SNIA has produced open source storage management tools available now on GitHub for your use. Join this session for an overview of these open source tools, which include a Swordfish API Emulator, a Swordfish Basic Web Client, an example Swordfish plugin for the Microsoft Power BI business analytics service, and an example Swordfish plugin for the Datadog monitoring service.

Containers are a big trend in application deployment. The landscape of containers is moving fast and constantly changing, with new standards emerging every few months. Learn what’s new, what to pay attention to, and how to make sense of the ever-shifting container landscape.

This live webcast will cover:
•Container storage types and Container Frameworks
•An overview of the various storage APIs for the container landscape
•How to identify the most important projects to follow in the container world
•The Container Storage Interface spec and Kubernetes 1.13
•How to get involved in the container community

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://bit.ly/2GPkFET

The FCIA FICON 101 webcast (on-demand at http://bit.ly/FICON101) described some of the key characteristics of the mainframe and how FICON satisfies the demands placed on mainframes for reliable and efficient access to data. FCIA experts gave a brief introduction into the layers of architecture (system/device and link) that the FICON protocol bridges. Using the FICON 101 session as a springboard, our experts return for FICON 201 where they will delve deeper into the architectural flow of FICON and how it leverages Fibre Channel to be an optimal mainframe transport.

Join this live FCIA webcast where you’ll learn:

- How FICON (FC-SB-x) maps onto the Fibre Channel FC-2 layer
- The evolution of the FICON protocol optimizations
- How FICON adapts to new technologies

Cloud data centers are by definition very dynamic. The need for infrastructure availability in the right place at the right time for the right use case is not as predictable, nor as static, as it has been in traditional data centers. These cloud data centers need to rapidly construct virtual pools of compute, network and storage based on the needs of particular customers or applications, then have those resources dynamically and automatically flex as needs change. To accomplish this, many in the industry espouse composable infrastructure capabilities, which rely on heterogeneous resources with specific capabilities which can be discovered, managed, and automatically provisioned and re-provisioned through data center orchestration tools. The primary benefit of composable infrastructure results in a smaller grained sets of resources that are independently scalable and can be brought together as required. In this webcast, SNIA experts will discuss:

•What prompted the development of composable infrastructure?
•What are the solutions?
•What is composable infrastructure?
•Enabling technologies (not just what’s here, but what’s needed…)
•Status of composable infrastructure standards/products
•What’s on the horizon – 2 years? 5 Years
•What it all means

Selecting a vendor partner (or partners) is one of the most critical decisions enterprises will make on their IoT journeys. The right partner makes all the difference: enterprises with top-ranked partners report greater success in generating revenue, cutting costs, and optimizing business processes via IoT.
• Who are the right providers?
• What are the critical factors to consider in selecting one?

This webinar reviews the provider landscape and highlights critical selection factors for companies of all sizes and industries.

When it comes to storage, a byte is a byte is a byte, isn’t it? One of the enduring truths about simplicity is that scale makes everything hard, and with that comes complexity. And when we’re not processing the data, how do we store it and access it?

In this webcast, we will compare three types of data access: file, block and object storage, and the access methods that support them. Each has its own set of use cases, and advantages and disadvantages. Each provides simple to sophisticated management of the data, and each makes different demands on storage devices and programming technologies.

Perhaps you’re comfortable with block and file, but are interested in investigating the more recent class of object storage and access. Perhaps you’re happy with your understanding of objects, but would really like to understand files a bit better, and what advantages or disadvantages they have compared to each other. Or perhaps you want to understand how file, block and object are implemented on the underlying storage systems – and how one can be made to look like the other, depending on how the storage is accessed. Join us as we discuss and debate:

"In the age of breaches, enterprises are looking to understand the security and compliance risks associated with data stored in, and accesible from, cloud applications so they can better prepare should the unthinkable happen. With data and workloads moving to the cloud, securing the enterprise is more critical than ever.

Join cloud, security and compliance experts as they discuss:
- How to proactively analyze security risk from the business perspective
- What you need to know about your data, and how to ensure it is compliant when in the cloud
- How to automate security policy changes
- Top challenges for CISOs and CIOs
- Achieving security and compliance across multiple clouds
- Steps to take today"

Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and other recent well-known technology trends in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.

This channel features presentations by thought leaders who cover the key topic areas in this increasingly important field.